Bookstore

Money Doctors. The Experience of International Financial Advising 1850-2000
London: Routledge, 2003.

"Tout le monde a oublié Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, un économiste français du XIXe siècle. C'est bien dommage: c'est sûrement le premier Money Doctor de l'histoire financière internationale. Les Money Doctors sont toutes les personnes ou les institutions qui apportent leurs conseils aux pays en crise. Un ouvrage dirigé (en anglais) par Marc Flandreau, professeur à l'Institut d'études politiques de Paris, en retrace une histoire passionnante sur cent cinquante ans". Christian Chavagneux, Alternatives Economiques, n° 224, April 2004.
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"This fine collection of 10 papers, with an overview introduction by Marc Flandreau, spans how foreign advisors proffered advice to countries suffering financial crises during the classical gold standard before 1914, the more chaotic interwar period of the 1920s into the early 1940s, and then the postwar doctrines of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when it was the world’s chief monetary physician". Ronald McKinnon, Stanford University.
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"The archival research that underlies many of the chapters is truly impressive". Anna J. Schwartz, National Bureau of Economic Research, eh.net (September 2004).
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The Glitter of Gold. France, Bimetallism and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard 1848-1873
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

"A revolutionary book. Flandreau shows the existence of a considerable gap between textbook accounts of the 19th century gold standard and the historical reality. His account will force readers to fundamentally rethink the conventional wisdom regarding 19th century monetary systems". Barry Eichengreen, University of California at Berkeley.

"France's crucial role in the world's conversion from bimetallism to the gold standard in the third quarter of the 19th century -assited by gold discoveries in California and Australia - is brilliantly set forth in Marc Flandreau's The Glitter of Gold". Charles P. Kindleberger, emeritus, MIT.

"The current fascination with globalization compares with the first great era of globalization, from the middle of the nineteenth century through to August 1914. For the earlier period, the international gold standard is generally seen as the unifying money machine, with stable exchange rates that undergirded the huge expansion in world trade and capital flows. But gold only became the dominant international standard by the mid-1870s. Before that, conventional thinking (including my own before reading this excellent book) saw only a confusing mélange of bimetallic or inconvertible paper standards. [...] Flandreau's book, first published in French in 1995, is a must read for all serious students of international monetary history". Ronald McKinnon, The Journal of Economic History, 64, 4, December 2004.

The Making of Global Finance 1880-1913
(with F. Zumer)
Paris: OECD Development Center Research Monograph, 2004.

"How much do we really know about those long-lost days? We can learn a lot more by downloading the new book by Marc Flandreau and Frederic Zumer, The Making of Global Finance 1880-1913, which has just been released by the OECD's Development Centre. Marc and Frederic's work is always distinguished by their careful attention to getting the facts right. Not satisfied with just using standard sources, they have searched archival material to discover the flaws in official statistics that were often well-known to contemporaries "who routinely adjusted official figures when they included known biases" - we wish that more applied econometricians nowadays were as meticulous. It's impossible to distill 150 pages in a paragraph, but a key finding of the study is the importance of government credibility, derived from a sustainable fiscal stance, in underpinning the globalization of finance in the gold standard period - in other words it wasn't the adoption of gold that did the trick. This globalization is documented mainly through analysis of interest differentials, which contracted dramatically between the beginning and end of the period. One intriguing chart that caught our eye shows how close the fluctuations in these interest differentials are to the alternative measure of globalization derived from the entirely separate Feldstein-Horioka methodology of investment and saving correlations". Patrick Honohan, The World Bank, Finance Research: Current Issue Interest Bearing Notes, July 2004, Vol. 7 No. 4.

The authors of this careful and vigorously argued monograph enter the debate over the role of the gold standard in the international economic system at the end of the nineteenth century. One issue is whether or not a country's adherence to the gold standard mattered to international financial markets. […] As far as they can see, international capital markets were supremely indifferent to whether or not a country adhered to gold. […] If I were starting to work on the "Good Housekeeping" paper again I would certainly write it differently. I would certainly want to take into account the important work by Flandreau and Zumer. […] Flandreau and Zumer have written an important book that future research in this area will need to take into account". Hugh Rockoff, eh-net.review (February 2005).
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International Financial History in the Twentieth Century: System and Anarchy
(with C.L. Holtfrerich and H. James)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

"This book [is] fascinating. In ten chapters, the essays lay out some of the important principles underlying path dependence between nineteenth and twentieth century international financial institutions. The essays are arranged in an order that demonstrates first the sophistication of late nineteenth century institutions and by the end the relative backwardness of what many consider to be sophisticated modern-day institutions". Joseph R. Mason, eh.net-review, March 3, 2004.

"Massive swings and fluctuations in exchange rates during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the consequent financial and economic dislocations, have generated considerable nostalgia for both the supposedly automatic regulation provided by the pre-1914 classic gold standard and the twenty-five-year period following World War II, when a system of fixed exchange rates pegged to the dollar prevailed. The editors and most contributors to this volume take a predominantly skeptical approach toward such roseate views of an idealized past and, more broadly, toward the very possibility of imposing strong institutional control over international financial markets and currency fluctuations. Many contemporary expectations on the subject are, they suggest, unrealistically inflated. The editors draw three “lessons” from ten historical studies ranging back to the mid-nineteenth century: “(1) attempts at international coordination or control rarely work; (2) such attempts are most unstable when they are politicized as a result of unstable international politics; (3) the markets are themselves possible only on the basis of powerful institutional, political, and social forces” […]. [The book’s] “underlying message is that those who remain oblivious to the shortcomings and failures of past efforts at international financial cooperation may well be doomed to repeat them. These carefully researched empirical studies provide a welcome antidote to much of today’s hubristic and overconfident rhetoric and predictions about the accomplishments and potential of the often poorly defined concept of globalization. Overall, this volume provides a salutary warning that, since the mid-nineteenth century, overly ambitious international institutions and schemes have often failed to accomplish their purported economic and financial objectives; and that only those mechanisms which have successfully met and reconciled the national interests of participating states have functioned effectively". Priscilla Roberts, Business History Review, Winter 2003.

The Gold Standard in Theory and History
(with B. Eichengreen)
London: Routledge, 1997.

"This revised edition of The Gold Standard in Theory and History should feature widely on reading lists in economics and economic history departments. I would certainly encouarge students to read it". Nick Crafts, London School of Economics.